Most discussions of John Boorman tend to ignore Having a Wild Week-End at the expense of his best American films, Deliverance (1972) and Point Blank (1967). Having a Wild Week-End was intended to boost the Dave Clark Five in the same way as Richard Lester boosted the Beatles in A Hard Night Day's (does anyone remember the Dave Clark Five?). At this point it's hard to tell if Having.. is a practice film (it was Boorman's first) or something of a melancholy put-on by Boorman and writer Peter Nichols. The Dave Clark Five are heard on the soundtrack (their songs seem somewhat insipid today) but the five members are not a band in the film, instead they are stuntmen in a meat commercial, with Barbara Ferris playing a model promoting the slogan "Meat for Go." Clark and Ferris decide to ditch the commercial and drive off to an island that Ferris is planning to buy and her agent plays up the publicity by saying she was kidnapped. Their stolen Jaguar gets blown up in an army training exercise and they hitch a ride to Bath, where they end up with a strange couple in a costume party (are you Harpo Marx or Shirley Temple?) before the police catch up to them and Ferris decides to return to modeling.while the Dave Clark Five decide to go to Spain and teach scuba diving.
This film gives people few choices in England: sell meat, end up as hippies strung out on drugs, as Boorman shows them, or leave the country; even Ferris's attempt to buy an island fails, as it isn't even an island when the tide goes out. Boorman and cinematographer Manny Wynn effectively capture the cold and dampness of an English winter, with tanks from WWII still rotting in the country.
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